It went on for half an hour, this skirmish, dying down only to intensify. And for that half hour, the hills to the west of Mezartepe Outpost were living hell. When the gunfire stopped altogether, Ziya and Ahmet lay gasping where they were, and there they stayed for some time, uncertain as to what might happen next. And when they were sure that the smugglers had turned back, they made themselves small and crawled down their ditch, heading towards the guards. Somewhere out there in the night — precisely where, they couldn’t say — someone was singing a song, or a lullaby. They couldn’t actually make out the words, which floated in and out of the silence that had come pouring back in after the gunfire. Sometimes the owner of this voice would stop. From fatigue, perhaps. Or to take a short rest. But then he would find his strength again and belt out the same song. Or lullaby, if that’s what it was. And then they heard footsteps. And then the rustling of cloth, the padding of combat boots through black sand. They echoed through the night, these sounds, and then, from the same place, there came a resounding whoop. It did not rise into the air, though. It was almost as if a fatherly hand had dissolved into a sound, to reach anxiously into the darkness, to search for those it had lost. But no one called back to it. The elongated o’s just hung there in the night, like giant hoops. And after that there was no more question of narrowing their sights. One after the other, Ziya and Ahmet climbed out of their ditch. Clutching their rifles, they ran down the road.
They arrived at the trench in time to see the sergeant from Mezartepe come running in from the west with his two watchmen. There was no sound coming from the trench, and, fearful that the men inside might be dead, the five of them went crunching over the empty shells to peer inside. They found Yasin of Hendek with his trembling arms wrapped around Mehmet of Elazığ. From time to time he let out a feeble moan that might have been a song, or a lullaby, elongating the i’s. Hiiiii! Hiiiii!
‘Are you all right?’ the sergeant asked them. ‘Were you hit?’
‘No,’ said Mehmet. ‘We weren’t.’
‘What’s up with Yasin, then?’
‘We got caught between two gunfights,’ Mehmet wailed. ‘We ran out of bullets.’
The sergeant reached down to take Yasin’s hand, and with his other hand he took hold of Mehmet. He pulled them both out of the trench. As soon as he was out, Yasin squatted down amongst the empty shells. He was still shaking, and moaning, ‘Hiiiiii! Hiiiiii!’ He would stop only to start again.
‘He’s in shock, I think,’ said the sergeant.
‘I don’t think so,’ Mehmet said. ‘He got so scared when we ran out of bullets, he lost his mind, if you ask me.’
For a few minutes they hovered around Yasin, uncertain what to do. Yasin, meanwhile, took no notice of them: he was looking, wild-eyed, at some other world. And trembling, of course. And making that strange sound. ‘Hiiiiiii! Hiiiiiii!’ Then the sergeant crouched down next to him, took him by the shoulders, and shook him like a tree. ‘Yasiiiin, come back to yourself, my boy. Yasiiiin!’ he cried, over and over. Seeing that this wasn’t working, one of the watchmen said, maybe he would come back to himself if we gave him two good punches. Still squatting, the sergeant raised his head as if in prayer. ‘How could you think of punching him in this state?’ he cried, and he bent his head. He was trying very hard not to cry. What the sergeant couldn’t do, the commander did, when he arrived about an hour later. Yasin was still squatting next to the trench, lost in his own world. The commander went up to him, looked him straight in the face, and then he punched him — a right hook, followed by a left hook. ‘Come back to yourself, soldier! Come baaaaack!’ But this didn’t work either. His strange chant just swung one way and then the other as it dissolved into the black wind. And that was when the commander rose slowly to his feet, and placed his hands on his hips. Lowering his head, as if to speak to the grass, he said, ‘He’s lost his mind, this one. Take him straight to Urfa.’
A week after Yasin was taken to Urfa, the commander suddenly announced that his tour of duty on the border was over. In just a few hours, he had rushed through all the formalities, and emptied the room next to the guardhouse and left, without so much as a goodbye.
The commander who came to replace him had no need for the room next to the guardhouse. He lodged with his family in a house on the State Battery Farm. He would coast in around noon, in a perfectly pressed uniform, all razor-sharp creases. He would visit the guardhouses and the headquarters, brushing the dust off his uniform as he went, and after issuing a number of instructions to the sergeants, he would climb back into his jeep and drive off. So the jeep was now stationed in front of his house at the State Battery Farm, because from time to time it would occur to him to get himself out of bed to go on night patrol. He and Ahmet of Polatlı would drive up and down along the barbed-wire fence, from one end of their territory to the other. He never even gave anyone the finger, this fair-skinned commander. He never even threatened to lose his temper or raise his voice. All he wanted was for everyone to know their responsibilities and do their job. And when he came to visit a guardhouse or company headquarters, his heart would seem to go out to these soldiers in his command. He seemed almost crestfallen. When he frowned, it was almost as if to say, ‘Dear boys, you’ve been to hell and back.’ And when he saw the narrow kitchens in which the cooks struggled to work, and the wooden outhouses, and the wells outside the guardhouses, and the cans, and the little broken mirrors dangling from the tree branches, he would turn his eyes away quickly, as if to stop himself from feeling too sorry for the soldiers, as if to keep their pain from blowing him in a wrong direction. And sometimes he would just plunge his hands into his pockets and stand there thinking — thinking about a better life he longed to live, in a better world, but without dwelling too long on the details of this life, which was nothing other than a tragicomedy, invented by children who’d outgrown childhood’s games. And after staring miserably at his feet for a time, he would climb back into his jeep, settle into his seat, with its torn cover and its bullet holes, and wave goodbye as he sped off down the road to Ceylanpınar.
A number of things changed in Ziya’s life, of course, after this new commander arrived. He didn’t go out on night patrol with Ahmet of Polatlı any more. His rifle and his cartridge belt sat unused on his shelf. And so he would go up to the top of the steps every evening, and sit there until late at night, drinking poison. Resul would go up most nights and find him swaying like a lost ghost; he would guide him down the steps and put him into bed, whispering, ‘You’ve really drunk too much tonight, you really have.’ And then he’d cover him with his blanket. When the guards came back from their trenches in the morning, and poured into the dormitory, bringing with them the scent of grass and earth, Ziya would wake up and a wave of shame would pass through him. He would have breakfast with them and then he would sit down in front of his typewriter and work all day, all alone in that little room. And whenever Hayati of Acıpayam came into his head, or Feyzullah of Niğde, or Mustafa of Yozgat, or Rasim Benli, the clerk from the neighbouring company, he would rush outside, and seize the watering can, and — even though no one expected him to do this any more — water the pine saplings. That commander might have brought them here, just to make him suffer, but now that he was gone, watering these saplings no longer felt like torture. As certain as he was that his saplings would never grow, he still watered them, and whenever he watered them, he almost cried. And then he would leave the watering can next to the water pump, and head into the canteen, of course, and get started on the poison.